At dinner on Thursday night, my dear boyfriend got incredibly sick. Now, I was fairly suspicious that it was just his attempt at keeping me from making any plans with friends for the weekend out of guilt and empathy so we could hole up in his apartment together, but I expressed a workable amount of pity, anyway.

He came home from work on Friday night with a soup container and a bag that he said was full of crackers, so I accepted that his sickness meant I was going to have to forage for my own dinner and went about my business. We made smalltalk about our days, and then he said, “Aren’t you the least bit curious about the food?” I hadn’t been before, but I jumped up and went over to his desk to find that the soup container had the Magnolia Bakery logo imprinted on its top.

It was banana pudding! And the bag of crackers was actually something called a Whoopi Cookie! See, Kamran and I have been around the block when it comes to Magnolia cupcakes, so we’ve been branching out to other treats each time we go there. We’ve been caking it up lately, but the Whoopi Cookie was something I hadn’t seen yet.

It’s two brown sugar cookies with what the menu says is a “dollop” of maple cream cheese icing between ($1.75). A Magnolia Bakery dollop is evidently the size of a small child, because this stuff was hanging off the sides of the cookie to begin with, and more oozed out with every bite. The cookies were soft and chewy, but the icing was the real selling point, and I wasn’t embarrassed to lick it off the paper wrapper when we finished.

This is my best friend, Tracey, very sexily enjoying a pickle at Cozy Soup ‘n’ Burger on Broadway in the West Village, my absolute favourite burger joint in the entire world.

Or pretending to enjoy it, at least. That’s because Cozy, like most other New York City diners, serves half-sour pickles. These are pickles that have been cured in a lower-salt brine so that they don’t ever become full-on delicious dills but remain nearly cucumbers.

Cucumber-lovers seem to like half-sours because they taste sweeter than the regular full-sour pickles you find in stores. But for people like me who only dine on cukes in sushi joints because they’re less gross than fish, a pickle in limbo is not a pleasant thing.